Friday, May 6, 2011

Who's politicizing Bin Laden's death?

So I'm looking on my Facebook page and I see someone writing the following:

Let’s be clear on this: OBAMA did NOT kill Bin Laden!
OBAMA did NOT kill Bin Laden. An American soldier, who Obama, just a few weeks ago was debating on whether or not to PAY, did. Obama just happened to be the one in office when our soldiers finally found OBL and took him out. This is NOT an Obama victory, but an AMERICAN victory!!

I commented that this idiot was essentially doing a cut and paste, and that right-wing blogs have been putting that same comment up everywhere. Of course, the idiot denied it, claiming that it was their own opinion, not something grabbed from some teabagger website. So I did a search for the comments, and found about 400 hits of the IDENTICAL wording.

Why bother lying about something like that?

The irrational cut-and-paste teabaggers don't even realize that using their own logic, Bin Laden shouldn't take credit for the World Trade Center bombing, because he didn't actually do it himself. So why did we bother to go after him?

Of course, I don't buy that kind of illogical crap. President Obama deserves as much credit for this as Ronald Reagan was given for the fall of communism. The difference, of course, is that unlike Reagan, Obama was intimately involved in the planning of the operation; Reagan just said "tear down this wall", after Gorbachev had already begun the process of transforming his country from Communism into something resembling a democracy.

Why does Obama deserve credit for what a soldier did? Well, why does Bin Laden get credit for destroying the world trade Center? Easy -- Obama, before he was elected, said he would make the capture or killing of Bin Laden a priority. He also enacted several policy changes that directly led to the killing.

* First, he ended enhanced interrogation, and went back to the old proven style of interrogation that the CIA used before George W. Bush took office.

* Second, he actually LISTENED to his military advisors, who had been telling his predicessor that the Pakistani government was giving aid to Bin Laden, and stopped sharing intelligence with the Pakistani government.

* Third, he gave orders for intelligence officers to not engage targets, and to simply gather information, follow people, until we have actual proof of Bin Laden's location.

* Lastly, he gave the orders, after intelligence officials had shown him, the pentagon, and the intelligence community the evidence, to plan for the raid.

The level of intimate involvement that the President had in the details of the raid was far more than what George W. Bush did when he went in to Afghanistan back in 2001. There simply is no way to take credit away from President Obama without being inconsistant.

If it were not for Obama, we probably would have given up on Finding Bin Laden, just as George Bush ad done in 2002, when he said "I don't know where Bin Laden is, and I don't care..."

1 comment:

Durandal said...

We should be asking why the death of Osama is some great victory. Is it going to end the bullshit wars? Was Osama even an intimate member of Al-Qaeda anymore? It really sucks the anti war movement evaporated with the election of Obama, but oh well, at least we killed Osama!